Director Johan Grimonprez breaks the silence on Lumumba: 'Eastern Congo is still bleeding'

In the excellent film essay Soundtrack to a Coup d'État, Johan Grimonprez links the assassination of the Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba to jazz masters, the Cold War, Belgian mercenaries, and the Civil Rights Movement. The avant-premiere in Matonge did not go unnoticed. The hope is that it won't stay quiet anywhere.

“Aaargh!” Not everyone applauds the animated screening of Soundtrack to a Coup d'État that solemnly opened the second edition of the Contrechamps Film Festival, Viva Matonge, at the end of June. One member of the audience in the well-filled Cinéma Vendôme in the heart of Matonge, prefers screaming in the dark, despite the sun shining outside. Her “Aaargh” is appropriate. The cry expresses the anger that the spirited, groovy documentary about the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba arouses and echoes the screams with which director Johan Grimonprez fires and finishes his film.

That scream pierces through the marrow and escapes the throat of jazz singer Abbey Lincoln in “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace”. That is the third track on We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, the groundbreaking album with which jazz legend Max Roach took a stand against America's never-ending racial and political abuses in 1960. Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach were also involved in the 1961 raid on the United Nations Security Council in New York with loud protests of the liquidation of Congo's first democratically elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. “Murderers! Slave drivers! Ku Klux Klan Motherfuckers!”

The jazz-driven, visually swirling, abrasive Soundtrack to a Coup d'État baffles by linking together Lumumba's assassination, the Cold War, jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong, decolonisation, the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement, and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev getting angry in the United Nations by banging his shoe on the table.

Ground zero
“Everyone knows that Khrushchev rammed his shoe on the table at the United Nations General Assembly, but hardly anyone knows why. Through his son Sergei, we got hold of his audio memoirs and home movies. A student of mine digitised six, seven years of recordings and searched them for keywords like 'shoe'. We discovered that Khrushchev's father would have preferred his son to become a cobbler (laughs) and that Khrushchev banged his shoe on the table because of the Belgian-American approach to the situation in Congo,” grins Grimonprez, who alternates between the Greek island of Andros and his pied-à-terre and workplace at the Brussels Vismarkt/Marché aux Poissons.

“On 5 September 1960, President Joseph Kasavubu dismisses Prime Minister Lumumba and vice versa. On 14 September there is Mobutu's first coup. On 22 September, the United Nations General Assembly begins. Sixteen newly independent countries join. A landslide. Patrice Lumumba is the most obvious absentee. All the great leaders inevitably talk about the Congo crisis.”

In full Cold War, Khrushchev wants to get the Global South on his side with a decolonisation resolution. The US would rather send out jazz legends Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong to win over the newly independent countries. “They were not passive pawns of the propaganda machine. Dizzy Gillespie stipulates that he is not doing it to cover up segregation in the homeland. We know from Armstrong that he grilled Moïse Tshombe who, with the support of the Belgian Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, had declared Katanga's independence when he was accommodated by him in Katanga. 'You share a bed with the big money!' But Armstrong did not know that Larry Devlin, the man who accompanied him in Congo, was not an agricultural adviser or writer at all but the boss of CIA operations in Congo and thus one of the main characters behind the plot to bring Lumumba down. Armstrong was furious when he found out. He briefly considered moving to Ghana.”

In December 1960, the UN adopts the Declaration Concerning the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. “The decolonisation resolution set a lot in motion. There was a tremendous sense of hope and solidarity. The Global South arose. The Non-Aligned Movement (countries that did not want to be involved in the Cold War between the Western and the Eastern Bloc, ed.) was on the rise. The Independence Movement and Pan-Africanism were a great inspiration for the Civil Rights Movement. Just look at Malcolm X's speeches. He named one of his daughters after Lumumba. But that optimism was brutally nipped in the bud,” says Grimonprez. “The flip side of the decolonisation movement and resolution is the assassination of Lumumba on 17 January 1961. That's ground zero, that is where the West shows how it would deal with Congo and the Global South. From then on, there is no more postcolonialism, there is neocolonialism. In a neocolonial move, people re-appropriate the African continent. In the earth under Eastern Congo lie trillions of dollars.”

The Heroine Andrée Blouin
Grimonprez enjoys international acclaim after high-profile documentaries on plane hijackings, terrorism, and media manipulation (Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y), Alfred Hitchcock doppelgangers (Double Take), and the despicable arms industry (Shadow World). Soundtrack to a Coup d'État fittingly had its world première at Sundance. The US's most important film festival awarded the film with the Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation and was followed by several other festivals.

During the animated post-screening discussion in Matonge, Grimonprez is flanked by two Congolese people of great standing who ended up in Brussels: musician Marie Daulne, who caused a furore with Zap Mama, and writer Jean Bofane, whose Congo Inc. is a key novel about Congo. “I was immensely moved by his book. It also allows me to end my film with a bit about what is going on now in Eastern Congo. We must not nostalgically focus on the past. The situation now is perhaps even worse than before,” Grimonprez says.

Jean Bofane calls Lumumba's assassination “more of a trauma than a legacy.” “We had already had to flee to Brussels. After his arrest, people everywhere were talking about him. Everyone seemed happy. As if an animal were to be killed and everyone would get a piece of the meat. I was six years old. I did not know and understand enough but that brutality shocked me. For four years I suffered from weekly nightmares about it. It deeply, deeply traumatised me and made me the human being I am.”

In the film, Marie Daulne lends her voice to Andrée Blouin. “I came across Andrée Blouin as an occasional footnote and wanted to know more about her,” Grimonprez says. “I fell off my chair when I read her hard-to-find memoir. She was Lumumba's adviser, a real freedom fighter, an inspired Pan-Africanist. She set up a women's movement, knew almost all the first independent heads of state in Africa and was friends with Sékou Touré.”

Marie Daulne calls it an immense honour to lend her voice to Andrée Blouin. “Worst of all, I didn't even know her. We do not talk nearly enough about these women. We all know the great heroes of the Civil Rights Movement and know what they did for the liberation and emancipation of blacks in the United States. But we virtually never know the name of those who fought for the equally necessary liberation of the Belgian or Congolese black. Not even me. How can that be? How come we don't know our history,” says the musician. “I think we urgently need to change that by putting fabulous heroines like Andrée Blouin forward as examples for young and old. I am incredibly grateful to people like Johan Grimonprez and Jean Bofane for breaking the silence.”

Marie Daulne did not respond to a question from moderator Raïssa Ay Mbilo about her family history and flight from Congo. “I am not starting a new line of discussion because that will be long and very sensitive. I have always preferred resistance. That resistance resonates in my body of work with Zap Mama. Protecting our dignity. Holding our heads high. Mary Angelou said: 'You are reduced to dust but the dust puffs up again.'”

Eastern Congo is still bleeding
Belgium's involvement is no longer a topic of discussion. “Ludo De Witte's books, especially The Assassination of Lumumba, led to a Parliamentary enquiry into Belgium's involvement in the murder. That caused a lot of controversy but many, including De Witte, are unhappy with the conclusions that they say are too vague,” Grimonprez says. “In fact, it was a soft cover-up. But the telegrams in the report really do put their finger on the wound. The fact is that Belgium was involved in Lumumba's murder. There is no reason to continue to deny that. Internationally, Belgium did say sorry and the king visited Mukwege's Panzi Hospital. But that is merely window dressing. A sorry is not enough. Eastern Congo is still bleeding.”

Some in the audience asked Grimonprez why he did not focus more on Belgium or the death of UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld. “That's another story and if we go down that route, we won't be done by breakfast. There is a lot that is not in the film. But also a lot that is.”

Images and testimonies about the 1964 crackdown on the Simba uprising in Eastern Congo did get a prominent place. “There was a genocide taking place there whilst the BRT was broadcasting the We Insist! concert with Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach. Lumumbists were simply massacred,” Grimonprez says. “The paratroopers and Colonel Frédéric Vandewalle's mercenaries did some bad stuff there. Operation Ommegang is a very black page in our history. Yet they are still celebrated every year as heroes who freed Belgians from the clutches of beasts.” The director feels that we do not talk enough about 1964. “There were enormous atrocities. Congo had to remain 'ours', or at least its mineral resources. Léonie Abo is one of the few who spoke out about that genocide. Her testimony is both harsh and heartbreaking. That had to be in the film. It gives a voice to what happened to Lumumba, to the rebels, to the genocide. Congo was simply raped.”

The use of a few gruesome images is questioned by a young man in the audience. “Congratulations on your film that demystifies the propaganda that this country has maintained for 60 years. Surely when Belgium sees this, nobody can deny the need for a street named after Léonie Abo or a Lumumba Avenue. But as a race-conscious and decolonised person, I want to ask, post-George Floyd (whose death by police led to global Black Lives Matter protests, ed.), about the choice to show the images of Belgian mercenaries killing a man. The murder of black bodies has a nasty history in cinema.”

Johan Grimonprez replied that he was aware that telling this story was “tricky”. “But I think trauma is shared by the one who undergoes it and the one who causes it. We talked a lot about those extremely painful images. You really would not want to see the images we left out. But I think that image is crucial. Images of the Vietnam War provoked strong protests. Images of concentration camps continue to remind us of what was done to Jewish people. I hope it is not cheap Blaxploitation but substance for debate. But if I hurt people with that image, I'd like to hear it. Because I could certainly be wrong. Soundtrack to a Coup d'État does not want to close debates but to open them. This is a story I was never told in school. Down with the silent empire.”

Soundtrack to a Coup d'État can be enjoyed in cinemas from tomorrow